As I've said, their house is on a high dune about 20 feet above lake level. Their yard is level for 50 feet or so behind the house until the end of the deck, and then there is a very steep drop 20 feet down to a beach that is 10 or 15 feet wide. Because of the steep grade, the shoreline can't be seen from inside the house-- you have to walk out to the end of the deck and look down over the dune edge. She did that and could then hear the dog better, well enough to determine that the sound was coming from down on the beach anyway, but the drop-off down over the edge of the dune prevents any light from their porch light from reaching the beach, so it was totallyblack down there and she couldn't see anything. My mother's knees are bad enough that she can't get down the dune stairs even in daylight-- she definitely couldn't go down to the beach in neartotal darkness to investigate.

So, she went inside and woke up my father, convinced him to get dressed, and sent him out over the edge of the dune and into the darkness to "find the dog." My Dad's hearing is not so great to begin with, and with all of the wind and crashing waves he couldn't hear a dog at all, and when he got down to the bottom of the dune he couldn't see more than a few feet because it was dark. He was down there severalminutes, essentially blind and deaf from the conditions, and wanderingback and forth along the beach calling to a dog he wasn't convinced was there in the first place. He finally found a small dog getting pounded by waves a few feet out into the water, just standing there and barking as waves crashed over it. He waded out and picked it up and hauled it back up the dune and they took it into the house.

They determined over the next few days that he had not come from any of their neighbors' houses in either direction for quite some distance on their road. They never got any positiveresponse to inquiries they made with Countyagencies where people might have reported a missing dog. It's possible (probable?) someone dumped him because of his age and infirmities, although once he dried out my parents realized he had been fairly well groomed and fed, and was as healthy as one could expect for a blind, deaf, old dog, and my mother would like to think that anyone who kept decent care of a critter to begin with wouldn't later just dump him out somewhere if they could no longer care for him. Anyway, I'm not trying to drag out a surprise ending here-- his origin was never resolved.

There's no way to know how long he was walking on that night, but he shuffled so slowly even when he wasn't running into things that he must have been walking for quite some time, and his bloody feet also suggested a long trek. He could not have started from very close by. Even if he was dumped on the road, which is a few hundred feet from the shore, that means he wandered randomly and literally blindly through the woods until he stepped out into nothing and tumbled over the edge of the dune (which runs 20 feet high all along the shoreline for more than a mile) all the way down to the shore. Once down at the bottom all he could do was wander blindly along the beach, trapped by a steep hill on one side, and pounding storm waves on the other side. Eventually he accidentallystrayed out into the water, and being completely blind and being tossedaround by the waves, he didn't know which way to go to get out of the cold water. So he just held his ground and stayed in one spot as best he could in the waves, and started to bark.

My parents blocked off an area in front of their house where they could put him outside for a few minutes and let him wander on his own without getting away. It didn't take much to pen him in, as he stopped immediately and changed direction whenever he touched something. Even an emptycerealbox lying on its side (only 3 incheshigh) was enough to pen him into the kitchen when that was necessary. If he felt the beginning of a hill, either up or down, he wouldn't continue at all in that direction. That was why we decided that once he had ended up on the beach, however he got there, he would have walked only along the beach-- he would never have started up the dune anywhere, because he was afraid of tiltedground.